Traders Risk | Page 3

bitterly, that being found out now would make any great difference.
* * * * *
Stepping out into the brief Calaxian dawn, he caught his glimpse of the Ciriimian ship's landing before the island forest of palm-ferns cut it off from sight. Homeside hadn't been bluffing, he thought, assuming as a matter of course that this was the task force Satterfield had been ordered to send.
"They didn't waste any time," Jeff growled. "Damn them."
He ignored the inevitable glory of morning rainbow that just preceded Procyon's rising and strode irritably down to his miniature dock. He was still scowling over what he should tell Charlie Mack when the Island Queen hove into view.
She was a pretty sight. There was an artist's perception in Jeff in spite of his drab years of EI patrol duty; the white puff of sail on dark-green sea, gliding across calm water banded with lighter and darker striae where submerged shoals lay, struck something responsive in him. The comparison it forced between Calaxia and Earth, whose yawning Fourth War scars and heritage of anxieties made calm-crystals so desperately necessary, oppressed him. Calaxia was wholly unscarred, her people without need of the calm-crystals they traded.
Something odd in the set of the Queen's sails puzzled him until he identified the abnormality. In spite of distance and the swift approach of the old fishing boat, he could have sworn that her sails bellied not with the wind, but against.
They fell slack, however, when the Queen reached his channel and flapped lazily, reversing to catch the wind and nose her cautiously into the shallows. Jeff dismissed it impatiently--a change of wind or some crafty maneuver of old Charlie Mack's to take advantage of the current.
Jeff had just set foot on his dock when it happened. Solid as the planking itself, and all but blocking off his view of the nearing Island Queen, stood a six-foot owl.
It was wingless and covered smoothly with pastel-blue feathers. It stood solidly on carefully manicured yellow feet and stared at him out of square violet eyes.
Involuntarily he took a backward step, caught his heel on a sun-warped board and sat down heavily.
"Well, what the devil!" he said inanely.
The owl winced and disappeared without a sound.
* * * * *
Jeff got up shakily and stumbled to the dock's edge. A chill conviction of insanity gripped him when he looked down on water lapping smooth and undisturbed below.
"I've gone mad," he said aloud.
Out on the bay, another catastrophe just as improbable was in progress.
Old Charlie Mack's Island Queen had veered sharply off course, left the darker-green stripe of safe channel and plunged into water too shallow for her draft. The boat heeled on shoal sand, listed and hung aground with wind-filled sails holding her fast.
The Scoop that had surfaced just behind her was so close that Jeff wondered if its species' legendary good nature had been misrepresented. It floated like a glistening plum-colored island, flat dorsal flippers undulating gently on the water and its great filmy eyes all but closed against the slanting glare of morning sun.
It was more than vast. The thing must weigh, Jeff thought dizzily, thousands or maybe millions of tons.
He thought he understood the Queen's grounding when he saw the swimmer stroking urgently toward his dock. Old Charlie had abandoned his boat and was swimming in to escape the Scoop.
But it wasn't Charlie. It was Jennifer, Charlie's niece.
Jeff took the brown hand she put up and drew her to the dock beside her, steadying her while she shook out her dripping red hair and regained her breath. Sea water had plastered Jennifer's white blouse and knee-length dungarees to her body like a second skin, and the effect bordered on the spectacular.
"Did you see it?" she demanded.
Jeff wrestled his eyes away to the Scoop that floated like a purple island in the bay.
"A proper monster," he said. "You got out just in time."
She looked at once startled and impatient. "Not the Scoop, you idiot. The owl."
It was Jeff's turn to stare. "Owl? There was one on the dock, but I thought--"
"So did I." She sounded relieved. "But if you saw one, too.... All of a sudden, it was standing there on deck beside me, right out of nowhere. I lost my head and grounded the Queen, and it vanished. The owl, I mean."
"So did mine," Jeff said.
While they stood marveling, the owls came back.
* * * * *
Chafis Three and Four were horribly shaken by the initial attempt at communication with the natives. Nothing in Ciriimian experience had prepared them for creatures intelligent but illogical, individually perceptive yet isolated from each other.
"Communication by audible symbol," Chafi Three said. He ruffled his feathers in a shudder. "Barbarous!"
"Atavistic," agreed Chafi Four. "They could even lie to each other."
But their dilemma remained. They must warn the natives before the